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Nearby Theaters

Located at the Five Points intersection of Chestnut Street. The 350-seat Jerry Lewis Cinema opened in around 1972. It was later twinned and closed around 1995. There is now a Rite-Aid drugstore on the site.

So the twinning did it in, in other words. I’ve seen that happen time and time again throughout my lifetime. For no matter how expert the twinning conversion, from a theatergoer perspective there’s just something unnerving about going to half of what had been a full theater before. So a great single screen theater gets twinned, people get turned off by it, and next thing you know it’s up for demolition. As in, hmmmm, I wonder why…?!

I think you make an interesting point. It is a little weird. Just to be fair, twin conversions can be very profitable. The Evanston Theatre in Evanston, IL did fantastic business after they split it up into four screens for many years afterwards. But the proportions of the converted cinemas were always a strange presentation for the senses.

I can see a newly built cinema built as a twin being successful. But how could any theatergoer expect a single-screen theater having been twinned as somehow being “better”? Where I grew up, the first multiplex to arrive on the scene was precisely that at the outset. A multiplex from the getgo. So people went to it without complaint and derived enjoyment from it because it was all so new and novel. But when the single-screen theaters around us began splitting up into twins and multiplexes to get with the new format, they really became pathetic. For it was impossible not to feel shortchanged from what they had been before. To sit squeezed into a mere slither of what had been a grand large-scale auditorium before. In the name of good taste and respect for the audiences, it just isn’t done. But in this case it was. And now every last one of those split up theaters, plus the multiplex-at-the-getgo that started the trend, is gone. No mystery why.

rivest266, can you possibly find an ad for the Jerry Lewis Twin in Carteret NJ which opened on June 7, 1972? The local paper at that time was the Perth Amboy Evening News. If you find it can you post it to the Carteret Twin Cinema page here on Cinema Treasures?